


much is taken, much abides

by Vernal



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Experimental, F/F, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 16:37:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14406162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vernal/pseuds/Vernal
Summary: Before Ilos, Shepard is forced to remember all the events that brought her there.





	much is taken, much abides

The streets take you when you are five, a scrawny thing already half starving from the orphanage. You grow thinner still in the lows of the Sprawl, the numberless run of skyscraper-edged streets that expands from below Washington, D.C. to somewhere north of Boston.

There are friends ( _a word you learn late_ ) and enemies ( _a word you learn early, hiding in the rafterbeams of a long emptied library_ ) but there is never enough, never  _enough_ ; never satisfaction in the soup-kitchen raids that feed the gang leaders best and the rest only quarter-full; never enough sleep in the steam vents above the subways ( _the only place of consistent warmth_ ); never enough friendship among the Tenth Street Reds to know each other's humanity. You are the street's, to keep and to care for, and the street keeps you, if only barely.

 

* * *

  

In the time between your twelfth and thirteenth birthday you earn the scar you now carry like a badge on your cheek. It runs left ear to nearly the corner of your mouth, a razor's work as you call out alarm ( _you have always been the best scout, the best lookout_ ). You do for him in the end, and the one behind him, and the Reds kill the rest.

 _You bought us time_ , the older ones say, later, pressing a bandage ( _it is soft, you cannot remember the last time you have felt something soft_ ) to your cheek. You look up at them and do not speak. Eventually they nod and go away.

 

* * *

 

When you are fifteen you give your body in trade three times. First to one of the older boys, such a common thing it is rite of passage among the Reds, a sacrifice of sorts. Second to a man in a far alley who has for sale cheap guns that still fire powder, and you shoot him after, with his own pistol, in the back of the head as he stands to get his clothes. You spend the night on his cot, watching his blood flower and dry in the cracks of the floor. Third to a friend, but one who pays you after, not knowing better.

 

* * *

  

At seventeen you find a rifle in a dumpster.

It is an old thing, stamped steel, rotted wood, a magazine half empty. But you curl around it each night as you sleep and when you wake to find a strange girl standing over you with her hand on the barrel you sit up and shoot her in the throat, and inside the warehouse the shot takes out your hearing—no pain, no drama, just a plain and absolute silence—and you watch the girl bleed out with her hands at the wound.

 

* * *

 

Liara stands over you as you kneel suddenly down on the floor.  _What is it?_  she asks.  _What is wrong?_

 _I don't know,_  you say.  _I don't_

 

* * *

 

When you are eighteen you join the Alliance. You learn how normal people behave in a few months of volunteering at a soup kitchen you once robbed every other week, learn all the words and earn clothes and straighten up a ruined mind and hide it behind a too-sharp face and too-quick eyes. The DIs have you recite the Rifleman's Creed ( _MY RIFLE IS HUMAN, EVEN AS I, BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE_ ) and you whisper it like a prayer.

They praise your marksmanship on the range and then they give you  _your_ rifle.

It is a heavy thing that is not the inelegant unlovely machine that an assault rifle always seemed to you to be. This is a tool, an artwork of polymer and steel that you shoot with whenever you can, that you can never miss with, that you hold and love so dearly (I wish you'd hold me that way, _a man says once, and you break his jaw_ ) that it is rare they can pry it away from you.

 

* * *

 

_know._

You are full to bursting with some nameless emotion and you curl into yourself and cross your arms over bent legs and tuck your head down

 

* * *

  

When you are twenty you see Earth recede in the window of the shuttle and you think,  _it's so small I could crush it between my fingers._

 

* * *

 

and she kneels in front of you and sets her hand on your shoulder and asks again,  _Shepard, what is it?_  and you slam the frame of the bed so hard you break the small finger on the edge of your hand ( _a minor fracture that Chakwas later fixes easily and without comment_ ) and startle Liara into standing.

 _I don't know,_  you say again,  _I_

 

* * *

 

When you are twenty-two you kill your first alien, a batarian. In the firefight that follows you kill three more, two who almost certainly would have killed your squadmates. Perched on a ridgeline with only the barrel of your rifle visible over the bare rock you hum quietly an old song you knew when you were young, and each time you take a target you allow yourself another sip from your canteen.

 

* * *

 

_don't know what it is, I just—_

And Liara kneels down again, at a safe distance, her hands up in a gesture to calm wild animals

 

* * *

 

At twenty-four you are the Butcher of Torfan, and the name does not weigh heavy on you, and no one stands in your way. You kill the last man yourself from a mile off, the riflebarrel sizzling in the rain and the visibility near zero and someone ( _your spotter, your friend_ ) murmuring in your ear  _Don't do it, don't you do it..._

You kill him with a gutshot and watch him die, and paradoxically a weight lifts from your chest when you see him go still and cold through the thermal scope.

 

* * *

 

pleading now:  _I just want to help you, please, Shepard, please, listen_

 

* * *

 

 _The ship is yours now_ , Udina says, and the bottom of your world drops out from under you.

 

* * *

 

_to me, you are in the Normandy, you are okay, I promise, you are going to be okay!_

_I know where I am_ , you snarl, but at the same time you are in a dozen other places, you are:

\- in the Presidium, all but screaming at the Council in a chamber that has rarely known raised voices;

\- back in the Sprawl, watching one of the older ones clean the blood off a knife ( _you have to clean it off every time or you can't keep it sharp_ );

\- on Therum, watching Wrex blow open geth in flowering chains of lighningblue sparks ( _the walls around you are older than the first evolvement of your species_ );

\- on Virmire, saying  _It's the right choice_  as you choose the mission over a man's life ( _the first time you have ever had a regret_ );

 _I know where I am,_ you say again, _I know where I am, I know where I am, I know where I am_

 

* * *

 

At twenty-eight you are a SPECTRE, and you fumble with the lives of your crew like a drunk with a fistful of credits, knowing their value but barely able to hold on, always slipping, slipping...

 

* * *

 

_Shepard, please, I just want to_

 

* * *

 

You are twenty eight, and on Therum, and there is an asari trapped behind a haze of blue energy ( _one hundred and six years old and almost all of it alone_ ) and you cannot tell for the life of you why anyone would think her dangerous, high parentage or no. In the fighting that follows she cringes away from incoming fire like a bootcamp trainee and you tell her  _Stay down,_  and kill the oncoming krogan mercenary with a shot that puts only one very small hole through the left orbit of his skull.

 

* * *

 

_help._

You are twenty-eight and you are in medical storage talking to an asari with no military training no fighting experience no time running with gangs no lack of formal education no kills notched on her rifle ( _you could not even count the scars on yours when you gave it up_ ) no hardship no hardness no lack of beauty ( _there are men that have called you beautiful but you have never noticed them_ ).

 

* * *

 

Something is crumbling inside of you, like the core of a collapsing star.

 

* * *

 

 _There is something compelling about you, Shepard,_  Liara is saying, somewhere far away and long ago. And you say,  _I want to believe that_  ( _meaning every word, every last word_ ) and some last darkness falls from your heart.

 

* * *

 

 _Shepard,_  Liara says again, but you are in so many places, so many other places...

 

* * *

 

You are twenty-eight and a SPECTRE and you are helpless on your back, and above you a blue face moves shyly smiling into view and you try to smile back only to realize you have forgotten how. Instead you reach for her as you have reached for rifles in days past, as you have reached for ammo ( _in desperation, in haste_ ) and you drag her down to you so fast your teeth click hard together and she laughs, and you are shocked to stillness by the sound of it, the carefreeness of those three high notes ( _hii-hii-hii_ ).

 

* * *

 

 _I don't know who I AM,_  you say, and the words come from somewhere so deep it hurts your throat, dragged scraping through your trachea like an airway tube.

 

* * *

 

You are twenty-eight, a SPECTRE, and tearing rents in the cheap military bedding as Liara bends down between your legs.

 

* * *

 

 _Just tell me what you need, I promise I can help you,_ she says.

 

* * *

 

You are five years old again, helpless.

 

* * *

 

 _Please,_  you say ( _it is the hardest word you have ever spoken, second hardest you will ever speak_ )—

and she reaches out for you, and there are tears ( _whose? not mine, please not mine_ ) and she kisses you so gentle ( _in the hollow of your hunger-gaunt cheeks, on the bullet-scar across your neck, on your forehead where nothing yet has marked the skin but age_ ) and she holds you so tight that it drives the air out of you ( _her head across your shoulder, the bedframe hard against your back_ ).

**Author's Note:**

> I had a very specific set of events in mind for one of my playthroughs, and I wrote this after one particularly tense playthrough of ME1. I was originally going to expand it into a much longer work (currently in progress—well, stalled—as _and not to yield._ ), but that seems unlikely now.
> 
> Title from Tennyson's _Ulysses._
> 
> I don't think I've ever written anything so choppy, so: comments and commentary appreciated.


End file.
